Microsoft pushed out a series of five patches for Vista early this week.
The updates - two of which were rated important, two are recommended and one optional - took security observers by surprise because they were released outside Microsoft's normal Patch Tuesday update cycle.
The "important" updates, released on Tuesday, …

Strike-through

DST 2007 - not for Vista only

The DST fix was actually pushed out to other operating systems, not just Vista. You can look at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933360 to verify and anyone running a WSUS will see that this DST fix showed up on other boxes as well.

Strike-back

Whats the point

They can patch all they like, Return to XP and run your computer the way the manufacturer intended it to be run. Nothing is Vista compatible anymore cos they keep changing it!! Went back to XP last night after 6 months and it was like a breath of fresh air. Fresh, unfreezing, un-hanging, hardware compatible air!

Patches cause media playback stuttering

I dutifully installed this collection of patches. I immediately started noticing problems when playing MP3 tracks in Windows Media Player. I was getting silent pauses for one or two seconds at a time before the music continued. This happened quite frequently: at least once very two tracks played.

Later, I was playing video content in VLC and I experienced the same type of pauses: video/audio freezing for a couple of seconds and then continuing.

After enduring this for a day and thinking that the patches must have been the cause I removed the latest set of patches. After 24 hours during which I listened to a lot of music and watched two hours of video I haven't experienced one media playing glitch.

RE: Strike-through

Title

All this moaning about Vista. I am very happy with it, it is stable, does everything I want it to, including things that didn't work in XP. There you go, there is at least one happy Vista owner out there!

Vista is a shambles

I hate when people bash windows all of the time, after 2-3 years of its initial release, it does get stable (normally after the SP2 has been released). I like Windows XP, better than most other O/Ss including Linux and OSX) just because it works, does what its supposed to and runs my games. But Microsoft does need to get a serious kick in the n*ts by a class action or something for them releasing an operating system that is not fit for use. They claim its reliable, good for playing media and games, plus some other nonsense. But obviously for many users this is simply not the case. I know of only 2 people who have had a painless experience of vista, and both were pre-installed on the machine when they bought it.

In my personal experience, i liked the interface on vista and the quick load times. What i didnt like was the fact that it took years to copy anything over a network, half my network devices stopped working, game performance dropped significantly and a whole load of apps and hardware refused to work. I had high hopes for vista (but i think i was just high when i had the hopes) but ultimately, companies as well as people are creatures of habit, Microsoft will forever release buggy, beta and bloated operating systems and other software until the end of time...

Well there we have it...

Vista

We all know people are idiots, but the amount of people ranting about Vista stability is not to be taken as any kind of measure.

I personally have been using Vista x64 since release and have found it stable and pleasant. Performance issues I've had have been directly related to driver issues. While I could say that that is microsoft's fault for changing the driver model, sensible people have to put the blame at the driver provider (nVidia in this case). However, nVidia got their fixes out in reasonable time and things are just great now.

Of the 8 or so people I know who have installed Vista, only one has reverted back to XP and that's because HP aren't releasing drivers for his printer and scanner on Vista and replacing them isn't an option.

The only reason we haven't upgraded at work is because we have a boss who likes Windows 2000 and is just accepting XP. Not for IT reasoins, just for ludite ones....

Patches

Those patches have caused me a great amount of grief over the last 2 days. While I realize the VNC is not officially compatible with Vista, it does work in user-mode. Due to firewall restrictions at work, I need to use port 3389 which is the RDC port. Since only Business and Ultimate versions of Vista allow remote connections (and I am not going to go pay to upgrade just for that) I was using it to remote into my system from work. Suddenly after patching, I can no longer access port 3389 on my system. VNC will connect on any other port, just not 3389. Nowhere is there anything in any documentation stating that MS was gonna close that port nor is there any place I can re-enable it. Remove the patches, works fine. There is no reason to have undocumented "features" like this, and that is the reason I don't like Vista. Too many things to control/degrade my hardware done by MS in the name of security or performance, none of which actually work.